A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire

425 Pages·2011·2.79 MB·English

by  Ogi Ogas, Sai Gaddam

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Foreword
Preface
Epigraph

CHAPTER 1 - What Do We Really Like?
CHAPTER 2 - Monkey Pay-Per-View
CHAPTER 3 - Elmer Fudd, Wabbit Hunter
CHAPTER 4 - The Miss Marple Detective Agency
CHAPTER 5 - Ladies Prefer Alphas
CHAPTER 6 - The Sisterhood of the Magic Hoo Hoo
CHAPTER 7 - Boys Will Be Boys
CHAPTER 8 - A Tall Man with a Nice Tush
CHAPTER 9 - Cheating Wives and Girls Gone Wild
CHAPTER 10 - Lords and Lordosis
CHAPTER 11 - Erotical Illusions

CONCLUSION
Acknowledgements
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

“Every
invention
in
communication
technology—the
printing
press,

photography, motion pictures, videotape, the Internet—was quickly co-opted to
produce and disseminate erotica. Just as the microscope and the telescope
illuminated for the first time the very small and the very large, A Billion Wicked
Thoughts uses the power of the Internet to illuminate, with unprecedented
wattage, human male and female desires. Ogas and Gaddam analyzed a
mountain of Internet data to produce a breakthrough in the study of human
sexuality.”

—Donald Symons, professor emeritus, University of California, Santa Barbara;

author of The Evolution of Human Sexuality

“A Billion Wicked Thoughts provides a brilliant, thoroughly researched, and
totally engaging analysis of human sexuality using vast and original analyses of
the Internet. It furnishes an X-ray of male and female sexual minds and explains
why they differ so profoundly. The insights it yields are often surprising,
sometimes shocking, and never boring. I couldn’t put the book down.”

—David M. Buss, author of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the

Mind and The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating

“On the Internet, the evolutionary past meets futuristic technology, enabling the
blossoming of all manner of sexual tastes, fantasies, and desires. Ogas and
Gaddam have mined these new sources of information—arguably the world’s
largest experiment on human behavior—to produce a fascinating and terrific
book on human sexuality, in all its timeless mysteries and ultramodern
manifestations. This well-written, entertaining book is packed with information,
ideas, and insights. There is no better way to understanding your desires, your
partner’s, or anyone else’s.”

—Roy Baumeister, professor of psychology, Florida State University

“A brilliant romp through the darkest recesses of our sexual minds, based on the
unwitting confessions of millions of anonymous Internet users.”

—Simon LeVay, author of The Sexual Brain and Gay, Straight, and the Reason

Why

“Ogas and Gaddam mine the power of the Internet for expressions of male and
female mating psychology that are unfiltered by social expectations. In the
process, they unearth A Billion Wicked Thoughts, many of which depart
radically from our standard script for human mating psychology. These
counterintuitive insights into the sexual psyche of our species should provide

much fodder for discussion among sex researchers.”

—Paul Vasey, professor of behavioral science, University of Lethbridge

DUTTON

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Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, May 2011

Copyright © 2011 by Sai Gaddam and Ogi Ogas

Illustration on page 48 based on original artwork by Anime Art, used under a Creative

Commons license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

All rights reserved

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FOREWORD

My first encounter with one of the authors of this book, Ogi Ogas, was about a
year ago. True to the online nature of the research he was doing for this book, I
heard from him via e-mail.

Ogi had read a book on sexuality called Warrior Lovers that I wrote a few

years ago, along with Don Symons. In it we used “slash”—stories about
heterosexual male fictional characters who fall in love, such as Captain Kirk and
Mr. Spock or Clark Kent and Lex Luthor—revealing an unexpected yet telling
aspect of female desire.

Slash is, in a sense, the ultimate romance for its female readers: one in which

there is no doubt at the end of the tale that these heroes have found their soul
mates. Ogi wanted to know if I had any new work to tell him about. To be
honest, I was a bit surprised by the initial e-mail—most conversations I have
about slash are with other women—but it soon became clear that Ogi was
interested not only in slash but in the bigger picture of human sexuality that can
be found in the vast world of the Internet. There is a lot of truth to the belief that
if you can imagine it, you can find it as Internet porn. That initial e-mail was the
beginning of a long and lively conversation about the nature of sexual desire.

But this book does far more than just show how wild and wooly online porn

can be. It opens your eyes to the sexual desires of millions of people and it does
so in a unique and valuable way. So much research on sexuality relies on surveys
and questionnaires that ask people to reveal secrets they aren’t comfortable
sharing (least of all with a researcher who will do who-knows-what with the
information). There is a real advantage in finding other methods of insight into
our desires—unobtrusive measures that don’t require people to actively
participate in the process of data collection. Just as Don and I demonstrated with
commercial erotica and slash in Warrior Lovers, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam
study digital footprints on the Internet to illuminate our understanding of the
stark differences between the desires of males and females.

The most startling insights often come from the most unexpected sources. The

authors’ academic background, for instance, is hardly typical for the authors of a
book on sex. Ogi and Sai were classmates in graduate school and their PhDs are
from the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University.
Most cognitive neuroscience researchers, if you hadn’t already guessed, aren’t
doing research on porn. But Ogi and Sai’s computational neuroscience
background led them to ask novel questions such as “how does the brain

software that generates sexual desire and arousal actually work?” No one else in
their field was thinking that way. It led them to not only use the Internet as a
source of data (their data-mining approach was one their mathematical
background made them uniquely suited to) but also to an adaptationist approach
to human sexual behavior. This approach views male and female sexuality
through a functional lens, as the products of differing selection pressures (or
problems) that males and females had to face (or solve) over evolutionary time.

The adaptationist perspective has been incredibly fruitful, particularly in the

area of female sexuality. Historically, there have been a number of challenges to
studying female desire and sexual behavior. There have been times when it
wasn’t considered appropriate for a doctor to even look at his female patients’
genitals. For male researchers to ask women about their sexual desires and
behavior was simply not acceptable. Even today, a female sex researcher will
have a much easier time in terms of how both participants and others view her
and her work. So the study of female sexuality has languished behind that of
males, especially back in the day when most scientists and researchers were
male. It was often only considered legitimate to study female sexuality if you
were trying to help women become pregnant. But the rise of the adaptationist
perspective (led by both male and female researchers) has focused attention on
questions surrounding the female choice of partners and how such choices would
have resulted in greater reproductive success in the past. This research has led to
discoveries about female mate preferences, the role of hormones and the
ovulatory cycle in female sexuality, and the function of female orgasm.

Without an adaptationist perspective, it’s unlikely anyone would have

designed a study to look at how well exotic dancers are tipped according to their
ovulatory cycle. The fact that tips are higher when dancers are more fertile tells
us something about both female desirability and behavior during ovulation and
how attractive this is to males.

The adaptationist approach was also the critical tool Ogi and Sai used to

unlock their exhaustive Internet data.

And they did so elegantly and eloquently. This book provides a refreshing

look at the big picture of human sexuality, informed by the ultimate unobtrusive
source of data, the Internet. And regardless of your background, you’re in for a
treat. You will learn about the endless variety of kinks and squicks (kinks that
you find gross as opposed to a turn on) that people have. You will also learn
about the essential male and female sexual psychologies, as illustrated by Elmer
Fudd (the trigger-happy hunter who sees what he wants, aims and fires, and then
does it all over again) and the Miss Marple Detective Agency (the female
software for figuring out if this guy is the right one). If that hasn’t convinced you

that you need the insights these authors have to offer, there is also the
importance of the Magic Hoo Hoo, critical to all romance novels . . . part of the
female desire to be sexually irresistible, and all that we can learn from watching
gay porn (which is amazingly different from slash, considering both are about
guy on guy action).

If you want answers to pretty much anything you need to know about sexual

desire, this is the book for you.

Catherine Salmon

Coauthor of Warrior Lovers: Erotic Fantasies, Evolution and

Female Sexuality and The Secret Power of Middle Children

PREFACE

The World’s Largest Behavioral Experiment

While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.

—Sherlock Holmes, Sign of the Four

There’s one special challenge that every behavioral scientist must eventually
confront. A challenge that sets all behavioral scientists apart from physicists,
biologists, and engineers. It’s the reason most students of behavioral science are
drawn to the field, and one reason most behavioral scientists are women. It’s also
the reason it’s the only discipline requiring all its practitioners to have their
ethics evaluated by committee. What is this unique challenge? The subjects of
behavioral science: people.

And people are a problem.
Most people aren’t particularly interested in contributing to scientific

progress. Who wants to keep a daily journal recording every time she yawns?
Who wants to get injected with radioactive cobalt before sticking his head into a
hole the size of a water bucket? There are groceries to shop for, customers to sell
to, kids to pick up. What kind of person wants to do boring tasks with no
personal benefit and for trivial money? Fortunately for science, there is such a
person.

The undergraduate.
Many sciences have a standard test subject, used over and over by its

practitioners. Geneticists use fruit flies, endocrinologists use guinea pigs,
molecular biologists use mice. For behavioral scientists, it’s the college
freshman. It’s easy to understand why: they’re cheap, in plentiful supply, easy to
motivate through course requirements, and willing to endure even the most
unusual experimental methods. Much of our contemporary understanding of
ethics, aggression, and sexuality is based upon the behavior of adolescent psych
majors. But recently, researchers have begun to wonder just how valid this

understanding really is. After all, don’t undergrads—jobless, childless, and
marinating in sex hormones—represent a unique specimen of Homo sapiens?

Surely there are behavioral experiments that don’t use college students? There

are indeed studies that use adults, children, and retirees. But almost all of these
people are still “WEIRD”: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and
Democratic. A stunning 96 percent of subjects in psychology experiments from
2003 to 2007 have been WEIRD, according to Joseph Henrich, an evolutionary
anthropologist at the University of British Columbia, and his coauthors. But the
real trouble, says Henrich, is that WEIRD people are different from the other 88
percent of the world’s population. He compared the result of studies on
cooperation, learning, decision-making, and even basic perception that used both
WEIRD and non-WEIRD subjects. Henrich found striking differences. “The fact
that WEIRD people are the outliers in so many key domains of the behavioral
sciences renders them—perhaps—one of the worst subpopulations one could
study for generalizing about Homo sapiens.”

But if people are such a problem, how can we possibly observe the behavior

of the full spectrum of humankind? Fortunately—amazingly—there is an
unprecendented new source of behavioral data, one that reveals the unfiltered
activities of a stunning diversity of people. This is the world’s largest experiment
on human behavior: the Internet.

The Internet records the activities of more than a billion people from every

country on the planet. This online data offers the opportunity to view even the
most fundamental human behaviors in a brand-new light. In this book, we use
data from the world’s largest behavioral experiment to reexamine one of the
most important and intimate of all behaviors: sexual desire. In the pages that
follow, you’ll learn the truth about what men and women secretly desire—and
why.

Everyone has strong feelings about sexual behavior, and that’s a problem for

the researchers who study it. We all have our favorite theories that fit our
experiences and prejudices. We all tend to think our own desires are pretty
natural and normal. But other people’s desires? They’re gross, immoral, or
downright dangerous. Sometimes, though, we hide desires we don’t want to talk
about, don’t understand, and maybe don’t want to understand. As a result of all
these intense feelings and prejudices, many twenty-first-century convictions
about desire are still imbued with superstition. By analyzing the intimate desires
of tens of millions of men and women and explaining the mechanisms that
produce them, we hope this book might shine some light into the darkness.

We need to warn you up front. In the pages that follow, you’re going to peer

into other people’s minds without filters or cushions. The sexual brain is

guaranteed to upset the politically correct, the socially conservative, and just
about everyone in between. This book is not an expanded issue of Cosmopolitan
or Maxim, and it’s definitely not for children. You’re certain to be challenged
and occasionally dumbfounded.

We also want to emphasize that this book is not intended as a complete

catalog of the diversity of human desire; far from it. We’ve omitted many
important sexual interests because of space limitations, and sometimes because
we felt we simply didn’t have enough data to do justice to a particular topic.
Instead, we’ve strived to convey the most defining and illuminating features of
our sexual desires.

Our lawyers instructed us to add another cautionary warning. Throughout this

book, we describe many adult Web sites that depict various sexual situations.
Often, these situations are depicted as genuine, even though they involve actors
in scripted scenarios. Sometimes these situations involve nonprofessional
performers and unscripted acts. However, much of the time it is not possible to
determine whether a sexual situation depicted as genuine on a Web site is, in
fact, fictional or authentic.

Finally—and most important—we can’t emphasize enough that when it comes

to understanding human desire, scientists focus on statistics rather than
individuals. We might say that men are taller than women because the average
height of the human male is taller than the average height of the human female.
But perhaps you yourself are a tall woman or a short man, defying the averages
and exposing the limitations of such generalizations. Nevertheless, by
identifying a real difference in the average heights of men and women, scientists
can then look for reasons why—such as the discovery that the pituitary gland
releases more growth hormones in men than in women.

We can understand how the sexual brain works using statistics and large

sample sizes. But you—you are a wholly unique combination of desires and
experiences that almost certainly exists nowhere else. No matter how unique
your own tastes, we hope this book might help you understand why you like the
things you do—and why your partner’s tastes can seem so different.